Are we bottoming out?
There’s always a danger of seeing green shoots where they aren’t really there. But I’ve recently had three separate conversations with the bosses of agencies who either feel that the worse is over, or at the very least things aren’t deteriorating further.
One of them runs a very large agency. Three months ago – based on conversations with multinational clients – he was very downbeat, now he’s cheered up a little.
Another says that there was a first stage where clients started warning that budgets would be uncertain, followed by a second stage where virtually every project and initiative was put on hold. Now several projects are back on and he’s scrambling to make up for shortages of staff he reassigned (but fortunately didn’t lay off).
Everyone I talk to is still extremely cautious about the rest of the year. While I think that life will be tougher, for longer for media owners, the number of people who think the sky is going to fall in appears to be diminishing.
On the staffing front… there are a couple of recent indicators that seem positive. We’re working on 13 new vacant positions which have arisen in the last three weeks, all of them in media agencies. Hopefully that’s an early sign that the market is improving; there haven’t been so many new roles at once since August last year.
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1. We signed up a couple of new clients after a slow Jan-Mar
2. I called the end of the recession Jan 09, BUT
3. And I think it is the worst possible outcome if bottom now because of gvt spend and the markets are not forced to ‘take their medicine’
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It’ll rally in Q3 not this Q – still a lot of caution out there
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I think we need to see how the new financial budgets kick in at July time as we are still operating off budgets from 12 months ago. I can name at least three companies whose budgets for the next financial year are at least 30% lower than this year so I’d lean the other way and say 2010 is turnaround time.
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Visibilty on ad spend is still short. We see some confidence reflected through various clients that feel there are sales to be had – cautious comments that consumers might be encouraged to spend a quid. We’d prefer to explore that angle rather than stomp on those green shoots and cry bear market. At this point, i’d take bottoming out as great news….
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“worse is over”…..sad. “Worst” folks. Couldn’t even be a typo!
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Thanks for flagging that one up, David. I’ve always had a problem with words.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
I’ve always liked what Stephen Fry has to say about language pedants:
http://www.stephenfry.com/blog.....%e2%80%a6/
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